Cameron Shorter

Saturday, 30 May 2015

OSGeo has adopted a Code of Conduct for use across events and projects [Press Release].
It draws very heavily upon upon prior work. In researching, it was interesting to see how Code-of-Conduct iterations have been steadily improving over time [2001, 2010, 2012, 2012, 2014, 2014]. Positive language has replaced authoritative tones; edge use cases are covered; and a gradual escalation process helps communities self police most infringements in a non-confrontational manner. Unfortunately, no one, has been collecting these improvements into a Universal Code of Conduct. It would have been really nice to simply reference an Industry Code of Conduct, similar to the Creative Commons Licenses for data, or Open Source licenses for Software.

Tuesday, 19 May 2015

We are starting the build cycle for version 9.0 of the OSGeo-Live DVD/USB/VM which will be released at FOSS4G in Seoul, Korea in September 2015.

We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to OSGeo-Live, anyone wishing to extend or add translations, or anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.

For this release we will be moving our version control system from subversion to git. This is currently getting set up and we will be providing details shortly. Git migration discussion is happening on our mailing list. Feel free to join!

Key Milestones

21 June 2015 All new applications installed, most old applications updated

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-live is a Lubuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and USB. You can use OSGeo-Live to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

Tuesday, 21 April 2015

I'm calling Esri out on their claim to be good "Open Standards" citizens. Esri is again abusing their market position to compromise established Open Spatial Standards, as described in an Open Letter from the OSGeo community. It starts:

We, the undersigned, are concerned that the current interoperability between LiDAR applications, through use of the open "LAS" format, is being threatened by Esri's introduction and promotion of an alternative "Optimized LAS" proprietary format. This is of grave concern given that fragmentation of the LAS format will reduce interoperability between applications and organisations, and introduce vendor lock-in. …

To be clear, Esri has extended LAS to create "Optimized LAS" which provides near identical features and performance to the existing and open LASzip format, both of which provide faster access and smaller file sizes to the LAS format. However, rather than collaborate with the open community, as has been repeatedly offered, "Optimiszed LAS" has been developed internally to Esri. It is neither published, nor open, which provides both technical as well as legal barriers for other applications reading and/or writing to this proprietary format. This creates a vendor lock-in scenario which is contrary to the principles of the Open Geospatial Consortium, the OSGeo Foundation, and many government IT procurement policies.

Esri responded to the open request to avoid fragmenting LiDAR standards with the following motherhood statement, which doesn't actually answer the key questions:

Regarding Dr. Anand’s concerns and the referenced letter below:Esri has long understood the importance of interoperability between systems and users of geographic information and services. Esri has participated in the development of national, information community, OGC, and ISO TC 211 standards from the development of the US Spatial Data Transfer Standard in the 1980s through the development of OGC Geopackage today. As a sustaining member of ASPRS and a Principle member of OGC, Esri would gladly participate in efforts to further the development of open LIDAR and point cloud standards. Keep in mind that ASPRS owns and maintains LAS, along with other spatial information standards, and would have the lead in moving it into OGC or ISO TC211 for further work if they so desired. Esri will continue to support and use the ASPRS LAS standard; the Optimized LAS (see FAQ at https://github.com/Esri/esri-zlas-io-library) is not intended to replace LAS but to enhance access to remotely stored LIDAR information for our users.

Lets refute Esri's statement line by line:

Esri has long understood the importance of interoperability between systems and users of geographic information and services.

Nice motherhood statement. Notice that Esri carefully selects the words "understood the importance" rather than "we commit to implementing".

Esri has participated in the development of national, information community, OGC, and ISO TC 211 standards from the development of the US Spatial Data Transfer Standard in the 1980s through the development of OGC Geopackage today.

More motherhood words talking about standards in general without answering the specific question about fragmenting of the LAS standard.

As a sustaining member of ASPRS and a Principle member of OGC, Esri would gladly participate in efforts to further the development of open LIDAR and point cloud standards.

Nice statement, without any quantifiable commitment. Will Esri put it into practice? Track record suggests otherwise. As explained by Marin Isenburg, Esri has talked a lot about collaboration and being open, while in parallel creating a competing proprietary format. If Esri were seriously committed to open LiDAR standards, Esri would publish "Optimized LAS" under an Open License, and/or take "Optimized LAS" through a standards development process such as provided by the OGC. Esri would have also build upon the prior LASzip format rather than redeveloping equivalent functionality.

Keep in mind that ASPRS owns and maintains LAS, along with other spatial information standards, and would have the lead in moving it into OGC or ISO TC211 for further work if they so desired.

Again, if Esri had the best interests of ASPRS and Open Standards in mind (as you would expect from a sustaining member), then we'd expect Esri to donate their LAS improvements back to the ASPRS for safe keeping. Why is Esri keeping such improvements in an Esri proprietary format instead?

Esri would be also lobbying ASPRS to accept improvements to the LAS format. Has this happened? Lack of public discussion on this topic suggests otherwise.

Esri will continue to support and use the ASPRS LAS standard; the Optimized LAS (see FAQ at https://github.com/Esri/esri-zlas-io-library) is not intended to replace LAS but to enhance access to remotely stored LIDAR information for our users.

Esri is sidestepping the issue. The LAS standard needs improvements. These improvements have been implemented by the open LASzip format and also by Esri's proprietary Optimized LAS. One should be incorporated into a future LAS standard.

The question Esri fails to answer is why does Esri refuse to work in collaboration with the open community? Why has Esri developed their own Optimized LAS format instead of improving an existing standard format?

Esri's FAQ, explains that esri-zlas-io-library is stored on github under the Apache license, which would make you think the code is Open Source and hence the Optimized LAS format could be reverse engineered. This is not the case. Esri has only licensed the binaries under the Apache license such that it can't be reverse engineered or improved by the community. By the OSI definition, this is not Open Source Software.

So I'm calling Esri out on their claim to being supporters of Open Standards. Please Esri, either clean up the way you behave, or come clean and admit that Esri abuses its market position to undermine Open Standards.

Friday, 27 February 2015

Release Highlights

Added Cesium
Cesium is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser without any plugins. It uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics, and is cross-platform, cross-browser, and tuned for dynamic-data visualization.

Added IPython
IPython notebooks contain a list of input/output cells which can contain code, text, mathematics, plots, maps and other media. They are a bit like a spreadsheet in that each cell can contain code or a formula, and a bit like a web page in that authors can create structured text along with easily embedding rich and sophisticated media.

Updated to GRASS 7
GRASS 7 is a major upgrade, in the making since 2008, and offers new modules, tools, analysis capabilities, optimisations, user interface improvements, new Python interface, and SQLite database driver as default.

Updated to OpenLayers 3
OpenLayers 3 is a fundamental redesign of the OpenLayers web mapping library to use modern design patterns.
Applications
25 geospatial programs have been updated to newer versions.

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine, pre-installed with robust open source geospatial software, which can be trialled without installing anything. It includes:

Over 50 quality geospatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured

Free world maps and sample datasets

Project Overview and step-by-step Quickstart for each application

Lightning presentation of all applications, along with speaker's script

Thursday, 20 November 2014

During a recent NSW tendering process, we discovered the NSW Government purchasing
guidelines actively discourage use of Open Source Software. These guidelines about Open Source Software are dated and need to be changed.

The guidelines:

Inaccurately imply Proprietary Software is less risky than Open Source [1],

Unfairly discriminate against Open Source Software solutions and Australian Open Source businesses [1],

Conflict with Australian government policy which directly mandate that Open Source and Proprietary Software should be considered equally. [2]

Increases the cost and reduce the value of NSW Government IT purchases by actively discouraging use of Open Source.

Could the NSW Procurement Team please review the current Open Source statement, assess the appropriateness of updating to Australian Government Policy statements related to Open Source, and reply describing how you plan to address this issue.

Reference 1:

The NSW IT procurement framework (version 3.1) specifically discourses use of Open Source software with Major Project System Integration Services.

23 Open Source Software
23.1 The Contractor must ensure that:
(a) none of the Deliverables comprise Open Source Software; and
(b) it does not insert any Open Source Software into the Customer Environment, except to the extent otherwise approved by the Customer in writing.
23.2 Where the Customer gives its approval in relation to the use of any Open Source Software
under clause 23.1:
(a) the Contractor must ensure that the use of that Open Source Software will not result in an obligation to disclose, license or otherwise make available any part of the Customer Environment or any of the Customer’sConfidential Information to any third party; and
(b) the use of that Open Source Software will not in any way diminish the Contractor’s obligations under the Contract, including without limitation in relation to any warranties, indemnities or any provisions dealing with the licensing or assignment of Intellectual Property.

Principle 1: Australian Government ICT procurement processes must actively and fairly consider all types of available software.
Australian Government agencies must actively and fairly consider all types of available software (including but not limited to open source software and proprietary software) through their ICT procurement processes. It is recognised there may be areas where open source software is not yet available for consideration. Procurement decisions must be made based on value for money. Procurement decisions should take into account
whole-of-life costs, capability, security, scalability, transferability, support and manageability requirements.
For a covered procurement (over $80K), agencies are required to include in their procurement plan that open source software will be considered equally alongside proprietary software. Agencies will be required to insert a statement into any Request for Tender that they will consider open source software equally alongside proprietary software. Tender responses will be evaluated under the normal requirements of the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines. For a non-covered procurement (below $80K), agencies are required to document all key decisions, as required by the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines. This includes how they considered open source software suppliers when selecting suppliers to respond to the Select Tender or Request for Quotation.

Sunday, 9 November 2014

We are starting the build cycle for version 8.5 of the OSGeo-Live DVD/USB/VM which will be released in March 2013, ready for several special events, including FOSS4G-NA, FOSSGIS Germany, among others.
We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to OSGeo-Live, anyone wishing to extend or add translations, or anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.Key Milestones:

1 Dec 2014 All new applications installed, most old applications updated

About OSGeo-Live
OSGeo-live is a Lubuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and USB. You can use OSGeo-Live to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

Saturday, 30 August 2014

Release Highlights

Lubuntu 14.04.1 LTS

We have moved from Xubuntu to the lighter Lubuntu base operating system, which starts up faster, requires less RAM, and uses less disk space, making it a better choice for running in a Virtual Machine or from a LiveDVD.

We have upgraded to the latest 14.04.1 stable Long Term Support (LTS) release. LTS releases are put out every 2 years by Ubuntu.

Debian packaging

We have steadily been moving more of our projects to .deb packaging, which makes it easier to install programs on debian based systems such as OSGeo-Live, and allows application of post-release fixes if required.

Applications

34 geospatial programs have been updated to newer versions.

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine, pre-installed with robust open source geospatial software, which can be trialled without installing anything. It includes:

Over 50 quality geospatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured

Free world maps and sample datasets

Project Overview and step-by-step Quickstart for each application

Lightning presentation of all applications, along with speaker's script

Monday, 28 July 2014

In this OSGeo-Live 8.0 development cycle we have seen major upgrades: moving to the light weight Lubuntu distribution, moving to a new Long Time Support release (LTS), and moving even more applications to make use of Debian packaging. It should be our best distribution yet. But this has impacted our schedule, as the Ubuntu LTS has only become stable within the last week (14.04.1 release), and we need help in order to deliver OSGeo-Live to FOSS4G-PDX with our usual high level of quality and reliability.
In particular, we need help:

Testing to verify everything works in this new system and fixing bugs. Download alpha1 here [0].

Updating version number in your Project Overview (if changed), and possibly mention a new feature or two. Doc howtos [4].

Re-running the Quickstart and ensure each step is still valid, and screenshots match the implementation.

Updating status of the Project Overview and Quickstart to "8.0draft" in our status sheet. [1]

Due to our tight timelines, we might need to hide applications which we can't get stablised, tested, or docs updated in time. Please check our current list of open issues [2][3] to verify that your project is working as expected.

Schedule

27 July 2014 Alpha4 released [3]. Please verify all applications work and fix bugs.

Thursday, 24 July 2014

In response to community suggestions in previous years, the OSGeo board has updated the voting process for OSGeo Charter Membership to be more inclusive. In particular, there is now no upper cap on the number of new Charter Members who can be voted in. This will avoid the disappointing situation where we our process denied respected community members from charter membership because we didn't have enough slots. Now, new charter members need only demonstrate positive OSGeo attributes as confirmed by existing Charter Members.

The official responsibilities of Charter Members is very light, consisting of voting in the OSGeo Board and other OSGeo Charter members. However, it is also a way we officially acknowledge the number of volunteers who help out in many ways with OSGeo activities.

So now the process is updated, I encourage existing Charter Members and community leaders to be proactive about nominating people from their community.

OSGeo-Live contributors,
As you have probably seen, the voting process for new OSGeo charter members has changed in order to ensure OSGeo charter membership is more inclusive and representative of the greater OSGeo membership.In line with this new direction, I'd like to nominate all active OSGeo-Live contributors for OSGeo Charter membership.I believe all active contributors that I've worked with meet the recommended membership selection criteria [1] which includes:

Previous participation in or support of OSGeo activities (you have contributed to OSGeo-Live)

The person should already have made a contribution to free and open source geospatial software, education or open data. (you have contributed to OSGeo-Live)

The person should be willing to put in time and effort on the Foundation, perhaps joining committee(s), or volunteering in some other way that gets the Foundation going. (Do you wish to continue contributing?)

Members should believe in the general goals of the Foundation. To support and promote the use of free and open source geospatial software, education and data in a collaborative manner. (I expect this is the case, as you have committed to OSGeo-Live license requirements)

Members selected should provide a diversity of geographic regions, diversity of projects, diversity of programming languages and diversity of interests e.g., corporate, hobbyist, educational, scientific. (Lots of project, language and geographic diversity in OSGeo-Live)

Members should be prepared to work constructively and positively towards the goals of the Foundation. Good teamwork skills are an asset. (All OSGeo-Live contributors I've worked with fit this criteria)

Monday, 5 May 2014

We are starting the build cycle for OSGeo-Live 8.0 which will be released in September 2014, ready for the global FOSS4G conference in Portland. We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects, anyone wishing to extend or add extra translations, or anyone who wants to contribute in code, testing or ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.
Also, could all projects please reply to us with which stable version of their software should be included in this release. Ideally, projects should provide debian packages for this release.

Key Milestones

08 Jun 2014 All new applications installed, most old applications updated

Moving to Lubuntu 14.04 LTS

OSGeo-Live 8.0 will be built upon the recently released Lubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support release (it was previously based upon Xubuntu 12.04 LTS).

Lubuntu, which is a LXDE based Ubuntu linux distribution, is light weight. This means it runs faster, with less memory and disk requirements which will improve the OSGeo-Live user experiences and allow us to fit a little more onto a DVD.

Moving to the 14.04 LTS release will help bring all applications up to the latest software, but will likely result in a number of applications needing to apply updates to address new dependency issues.

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or Virtual Machine based on Lubuntu, that allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

Friday, 14 March 2014

OSGeo today announced that the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection version 7.9 has been released, featuring more than fifty open source, standards compliant geospatial desktop applications, web applications and frameworks.

Release Highlights

This release is a modernization update to last year's 7.0 release including new versions of the software but preserving much of the core build and operating system. In addition we've added a number of small fixes and updated document translations.OSGeo-Live Lightning Presentation
The OSGeo-Live Lightning Presentation which explains the breadth of OSGeo software is now bundled with OSGeo-Live. It is often presented by conference organisors, or keynote speakers. The presentation may be given as is, or modified to align with time constraints, presenter's interest, or conference focus.
http://live.osgeo.org/livedvd/docs/en/presentation/Applications
Twenty two geospatial programs have been updated to newer versions. The core geospatial stack has also been upgraded from UbuntuGIS, and the base operating system has been updated to Xubuntu 12.04.4 LTS, including all the latest security and bug fixes, and web browser updates.

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux. OSGeo-Live is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. All applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from a DVD or USB drive, or running in a Virtual Machine environment. Each featured package is accompanied by both a publication quality one page descriptive summary and a short tutorial on how to get started using it.
http://live.osgeo.org
OSGeo-Live includes:

Over sixty quality geospatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured

Sponsoring organisations

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGeo provides the primary development and hosting infrastructure and personnel for the OSGeo-Live project, and infrastructure for many of the software projects themselves. http://osgeo.org

LISAsoft provides sustaining resources and staff toward the management and packaging of software onto the Live DVD. http://www.lisasoft.com

Information Center for the Environment (ICE) at the University of California, Davis provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo Live project. http://ice.ucdavis.edu

Remote Sensing Laboratory at the National Technical University of Athens, provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo-Live project. http://www.ntua.gr

Friday, 20 December 2013

Starting build cycle for OSGeo-Live 7.9

20 December 2013
We are starting the build cycle for version 7.9 of the OSGeo-Live DVD/USB/VM which will be released in March 2013, ready for several special events, including the OSGeo Code Sprint in Vienna, Spanish FOSS4G, French FOSS4G, FOSSGIS Germany, among others.
Our aim for this release is to focus on .deb packaging, which will make projects simple to install on all debian and ubuntu based distributions.
We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to OSGeo-Live, anyone wishing to extend or add translations, or anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.
IMPORTANT : Could all projects please reply to us with the preferred, stable version of software to be included in this release.

Key Milestones

14 Jan 2014 All new applications installed, most old applications updated

OSGeoLive 7.9 Alpha1 released

We have released the first alpha version of OSGeo-Live, which builds upon Xubuntu 12.04.3 release along with updated versions of applications from UbuntuGIS repository. Feel free to start testing your applications in the latest release. Download Alpha 1

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-live is an XUbuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and USB. You can use OSGeo-Live to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

At the upcoming Envirohack event, I'll be compressing weeks worth of LISAsoft's Open Source Geospatial training material into a 10 minute lightning overview on how to publish geographic maps. I confess that I'll need to skimp on a few details, but it will give attendees direction on where to start, and where to look for more information.

Envirohack is a one day hack-a-thon being held 29 November 2013 in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, aimed at building prototypes of application prototypes which make use of Australian geospatial datasets.
Datasets include:

Friday, 15 November 2013

Request from the World Bank:
Typhoon Yolanda has had a devastating impact on the Philippines. Thousands are feared dead and many more have been affected by one of the strongest storms on record. The work required to respond and recover from this event will be massive.

One way that you can help is by contributing to OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is a free and open map of the world that everyone can access and contribute to. Right now, hundreds of volunteers from all over the world are working together to digitize roads, buildings, and other features from satellite imagery made freely available by Microsoft and the US State Department's Humanitarian Information Unit. With the coordination of our partners at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, the geographic information they are creating is already being used by the Red Cross, the United Nations and other responding organizations working in the Philippines. There is more work to be done and the Understanding Risk Community is uniquely positioned to help.

Wednesday, 6 November 2013

You may remember the contentious proposal for the GeoServices REST API to become an OGC standard? After strong community concerns, largely focused on duplication of existing standards, the motion to approve the proposed standard was withdrawn. The fact that the proposal progressed as far as it did, to the point where it was almost ratified as a standard before being blocked, was a primary driver leading the OGC to initiate an "Ideas for OGC" (Ideas4OGC) review, aimed at re-baselining OGC priorities and processes.
Re-assessing OGC priorities and processes was timely. The OGC is almost 20 years old. OGC standards are now addressing broader and more complicated use cases than OGC's original focus, including mass market, mission critical and production uses. This leads to greater complexity, pressure to maintain consistency between standards, as well as higher requirements for robustness, quality, and clear documentation.
These drivers were fed into the Ideas4OGC initiative, and I've been impressed with the initial set of recommendations which clearly and concisely address OGC's revised priorities and objectives. Highlights include:

... any [standard] coming to OGC .. should go through an “early” evaluation process to test the validity of adding it to the OGC baseline. ...

Early evaluation of [a] new domain's [uniqueness], usefulness and applicability to OGC ...

... strongly encourage internal harmonization of OGC standards ...

Routine harmonization through regular standards maintenance. ...

Develop concise overviews for each standard for managers, architects and programmers. ...

Develop a set of accessible, concise summaries of OGC rules, policies and procedures ...

The next challenge for the OGC will be to re-prioritise sponsor focus on improving core quality over features. It is exactly what is required, but is a tough sell, as the value is much harder to quantify and justify than developing a standard for a specific use case.

Monday, 2 September 2013

The OSGeo-Live geospatial software collection version 7.0 has been released, featuring more than sixty open source, standards compliant geospatial desktop applications, web applications and frameworks. A complete installation kit and high-quality sample data in multiple industry standard formats are included. The OSGeo Live will be officially launched at FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham, UK, 17-21 September, 2013.

All geospatial applications on the disc have been updated to their latest stable releases.

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux (version 12.04 LTS). OSGeo-Live is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. All applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from a DVD or USB drive, or running in a Virtual Machine environment. Each featured package is accompanied by both a publication quality one page descriptive summary and a short tutorial on how to get started using it.

Sponsoring organisations

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGeo provides the primary development & hosting infrastructure and personnel for the OSGeo-Live project, and infrastructure for many of the software projects themselves.

LISAsoft provides sustaining resources and staff toward the management and packaging of software onto the Live DVD. http://www.lisasoft.com

Information Center for the Environment (ICE) at the University of California, Davis provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo Live project. http://ice.ucdavis.edu

Remote Sensing Laboratory at the National Technical University of Athens, provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo-Live project. http://www.ntua.gr

Thursday, 27 June 2013

One of the valuable qualities I've observed of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) during the past decade, is the extent to which they embrace feedback and constructive criticism and search out innovated ways to improve themselves. We are currently seeing another example of this following heated debate which resulted in the withdrawal of the "GeoServices REST API" as a proposed standard. The debate highlighted divided opinions around the primary purposes of standards, what should constitute a standard, and whether OGC and sponsors should be placing a greater emphasis on quality over quantity.
This has been the first time that there has been so much contention around a proposed standard, and I'd argue that it is an indication that the OGC has reached a threshold moment. Spatial Data Infrastructures around the world have been moving from pilots and non-core systems into central mission critical infrastructure. This in turn has impacted government policy, business models, and requirements of OGC standards.
In response, the OGC has reached out to OGC membership to help re-define the OGC. Mark Reichardt , President and CEO of the OGC, called on OGC membership to help redefine and strengthen the OGC:

... I have asked Geoff Zeiss and Jack Pellicci from our board to join me in establishing a leadership group to solicit your ideas and concerns, and to produce a slate of recommendations for action within 90 days. If you have an interest in working with us as part of this group to represent the interests of the OGC membership please contact me as soon as possible. An online forum will also be created to provide an open and accessible environment for members and the public to participate. We will be setting up a series of online meetings in the coming weeks, with a first meeting scheduled on 2 July for OGC members only. Registration details can be found here. A meeting open to the public will be scheduled for 11 July with several follow-up sessions for members and the public planned for late July and early September. We’ve also set up a wiki and email address to receive your feedback. My commitment is to have resulting recommendations brought to OGC membership, staff and the OGC Board of Directors for action as part of our upcoming September TC/PC meetings in Frascati, Italy. ...

So what should be on the OGC agenda? I suggest:

Consider redirecting OGC sponsorship to provide a greater emphasis on Quality over Quantity. In particular, improve criteria for understandability through better documentation, improve testing frameworks, ensure robust implementations are in place before declaring a standard production ready.

As governments around the world start embracing Open Government principles, they will find they need to take greater responsibility for protecting the principles of Open Government, and be empowered and confident enough to write something like this statement, and help take a leadership role within the OGC.

Revisit the definition of an Open Standard, and ensure it meets the goals of SDI champions (primarily governments).

Thursday, 30 May 2013

Following on from significationdiscussionandconcern from OSGeo and OGC communities, members of the OGC have withdrawn the "Geoservices REST API" candidate OGC standard.
Thank you to all the people who have voiced their concerns, thank you to
those who provided detailed reasoning and analysis, and thank you to
the OGC and OGC members who have acknowledged and have started
actioning this reasoning. You are contributing toward a better OGC
for us all.
Carl
Reed, CTO and Executive Director of OGC Standards Program made the following announcement:

On Tuesday of this week, the GeoServices REST API Standards Working Group (SWG) voted to approve the following recommendation to the TC Voting Members:

The GeoServices REST SWG recommends the Technical Committee (TC) approve withdrawal of the motion to approve the OGC GeoServices REST API documents as an official OGC standard.

Moved: Keith Ryden. Second: Clemens Portele. There was no objection to unanimous consent.
The following is the reason for requesting the motion to approve the candidate standard be withdrawn:

“Considering the breath of discussion both internal and external to the OGC process since the vote announcement, the SWG members feel that the vote cannot continue until the many questions raised have been addressed. Issues regarding OGC process, vendor advantage, duplication of capabilities, etc. have now overshadowed technical discussions of the merits of the specification. By withdrawing the OGC GeoServices REST API candidate standard, the necessary discussions regarding OGC process, policy, and position can continue separately.”

The SWG further discussed the need for OGC Members and staff to debate, clarify and potentially amend a number of policy and procedural issues before the SWG can decide to either disband or to resume technical work on the candidate standard.
Today or tomorrow the TC Chair (me) will be asking the TC Voting Members to consider the GeoServices REST API SWG recommendation. The motion is:

"The GeoServices REST API SWG recommends that the GeoServices adoption vote be withdrawn. If there is no objection to unanimous consent in the next 10 calendar days, then the motion is approved. If there are objections, than a two week e-vote will be initiated."

Over the coming months there will be opportunities for OGC staff, members and the general public to engage in discussions related to policy and procedures, such as clear statements on openness and interoperability, overlapping standards, backwards compatibility and so forth. The idea is to begin a dialogue as part of the virtual meetings this and next month with a goal to address the issues raised and recommend changes at the upcoming September Frascati meetings.
I would like to thank the SWG for all of their hard work on the candidate standard. I would also like to thank everyone who contributed to the conversation.

Wednesday, 22 May 2013

In what has become the OGC’s most contentious vote to date, OGC members are being asked whether the proposed "Geoservices REST API" should be accepted as an OGC standard. A summary of concerns are listed in an Open Letter from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) to the OGC. However, the crux of contentions hinge around the definition of an Open Standard and whether the "Geoservices REST API" qualifies as one.
When measured against government’s policy drivers of interoperability, fair competition, and economical use of government funds, the evidence is overwhelming. "Geoservices REST API" fails on all accounts. In fact, we should be questioning why our OGC processes haven’t identified and then addressed these issues much earlier.

Background

As background, the "Geoservices REST API" describes the interface to a dominant vendor’s web service (ESRI’s ArcGIS Server), and overlaps substantially with OGC’s existing suite of web service standards.

What is an Open Standard?

The Government will use open standards in its procurement specifications and require solutions to comply with open standards. The Government will support the development of open standards and specifications.

Consequently, government contracts typically specify use of standards when purchasing systems. This places a responsibility on standards organisations to protect government policy when selecting and defining the standards baseline.
Superficially, the "Geoservices REST API" meets the European Interoperability Framework minimal definition of a standard:

The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).

The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.

The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.

Public sector consumers of software have an obligation to support interoperability, transparency and flexibility, as well as economical use of public funds. When it comes to public procurement, the principles applied to the public sector require them to support (and certainly not to harm) competition through their procurement practices.Good practice eGovernment services should provide access based on open standards, and in particular, never require citizens to purchase or use systems from specificvendors in order to access public services: this is equivalent to granting such vendors a state-sanctioned monopoly.

Unfortunately, the "Geoservices REST API" would create new standards rather than use and/or extend existing OGC web services. Emphasis on reuse of standards is important for increasing interoperability, as duplication of standards typically results in:

Implementation costs to support multiple standards increases.

Consequently, organisations and/or applications may choose to only support one standard, or only support one standard fully.

Sponsors (such as governments) who require compliance with standards will discover that applications don't communicate together, due to applications supporting different standards that essentially do the same thing.

After a while, in order to solve interoperability issues, a respected international organisation or program will likely take the initiative to mandate one prefered standard for all agencies to follow. To date, the OGC has provided this leadership.

One standard taking prominence over the other will likely lead to the other being neglected or deprecated, resulting in many OGC compliant systems becoming legacy systems in the process. This should be considered an undesirable outcome for a standards organisation.

Costs increase, interoperability decreases.

Fair competition

ESRI’s ArcGIS Server is currently the only server which provides a full implementation of the "Geoservices REST API", as you would expect when an API is derived directly from a product. As such, if the "Geoservices REST API" were to be included in the OGC baseline, and government contracts continue to reference the OGC baseline in contracts, then governments would be giving one vendor a significant market advantage while other vendors wear the cost of developing matching implementations for the proposed standard.
Further, ESRI may continue to use its market dominance to promote use of the "Geoservices REST API" at the expense of existing OGC web services. (As described in ArcGIS Server documentation, support for OGC’s W*S services are disabled by default while GeoServices REST and KML are enabled).

Where are the Open Source implementations?

Verify that the standards used are open; a simple test for openness is to determine if the standard is implemented by open source software.

Currently, very little open source has been developed to support the "Geoservices REST API" and there is wide opposition to the proposed standard from the Open Source community.
Open Source implementations referenced by proponents of the "Geoservices REST API" include immature implementations, partial implementations and a library application. That is: a roadmap document for GeoServer, a sandbox implementation of an Openlayers client, a 52North SOS extension to ArcGIS Server and the GDAL translation library.
By comparison, there are multiple production grade, client and server, open source implementations, which cover the full breadth of existing OGC standards, which have matured over the past decade, and there are open source reference implementations for most (all?) current OGC standards.
So by the Open Technology Development definition, The "Geoservices REST API" hasn’t yet reached the maturity of an Open Standard.

Where are OGC’s gatekeepers?

There are 481 OGC members, with close to 100 of them with voting privileges, yet regularly, less than 40% of these voting members actually vote on proposed standards. This is a concern if these members are being relied upon to uphold OGC values, and we should question why voting is so low. A key factor in low voter turnout is likely the complexity and volume of material voters need to understand in order to make an informed decision. Gatekeepers just don’t have the time to be abreast of all the issues, and current standards are hard to read. The increase in the breadth and application of OGC standards has led to a stronger need for integration of standards, architectural overviews, and clearer implementation guidelines.
Maintaining and verifying quality best addressed by defining and following development and validation processes, and OGC processes should be improved to match the complexity of the systems they represent. In particular, OGC should revisit goals and requirements for quality standards, then resource technical writers and reviewers to work against such requirements. Approving a standard is therefore simplified to verifying the process is valid and has been followed. This would require OGC sponsorship priorities changed to provide greater emphasis on quality over quantity of standards.

A blueprint for moving forward

Lets expand on the steps involved in deciding on the value of a standard:

Governments policies should embody government best practices. Many countries have already taken this initiative.

Standards organisations, should embrace such government policies.

A clear definition of an "open standard" is required, which addresses government policy requirements of interoperability, fair competition, free access to government services, and economical use of public funds. This should be expanded into clear guidelines to be applied by OGC Gatekeepers and standards developers. The OGC should revisit the "open standards" definition, and in particular, ensure the definition extends beyond the technical to include policy implications.

Suitable training should be available to OGC Gatekeepers and implementers of OGC based solutions. LISAsoft provides an Effective Software Selection course which closely aligns with such training requirements.

The OGC and OGC sponsors should consider realigning priorities. In particular:

Place a greater emphasis on quality over quantity of standards. This includes: harmonising competing standards, improving quality of writing to support understandability and implementability, and extend testing to verify standards are implemented correctly.

Provide simple and clear descriptions of standards. The OSGeo-Live project has addressed similar issues by providing a concise one page project overview, plus a ten minute quickstart, translated into 11 languages, for fifty of the best geospatial open source applications.

Summary

As the success of the OGC increases, the OGC will need to be mindful of business and policy implications associated with adopting established interfaces as standards. Specifically, accepting the currently proposed "Geoservices REST API" as a standard will have detrimental impacts on interoperability, fair competition, and economic use of public funds. Instead, the positive aspects of the "Geoservices REST API" should be harmonised and incorporated into the existing OGC baseline of standards. Also, as the breadth of technology covered by OGC standards increases, it is becoming more difficult for gatekeepers to monitor the quality of these standards and consequently it is becoming more important to focus on quality and understandability of these standards. In moving forward, the OGC membership should revisit OGC priorities, and consider placing a greater emphasis on quality over quantity.

Thursday, 16 May 2013

We are starting the build cycle for the 7.0 OSGeo-Live DVD/USB/VM which will be released in September 2013, ready for the global FOSS4G conference in Nottingham, UK. We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to the live DVD, anyone wishing to extend or add extra translations, or anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.
Also, could all projects please reply to us with which stable version of their software should be included in this release.

Key Milestones

17 Jun 2013 All new applications installed, most old applications updated

OSGeoLive 7.0-alpha1 released

We have released the first alpha version of OSGeo-Live, which includes an update from Xubuntu 12.04 to 12.04.2 along with updated versions of applications from UbuntuGIS repository. Feel free to start testing your applications in the latest release. Download Alpha 1

About OSGeo-Live

The OSGeo Live demo DVD/VM/USB is an Xubuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and USB. You can use it to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

Monday, 13 May 2013

Next Wednesday, the OSGeo Board will deliver an Open Letter to the OGC and OGC voting members, with multiple signatures, demonstrating the large number of people concerned about the negative consequences associated with making the "Geoservices REST API" an OGC standard.
The "GeoServices REST API" was initially developed by ESRI and implemented on the ArcGIS Server
platform before going through the OGC process. It significantly overlaps with OGC's existing W*S services, but isn't based upon these existing standards. Consequently, we have grave concerns that the two competing sets of standards, which essentially cover the same use cases, will have far reaching, detrimental impacts on interoperability, complexity, and costs within the spatial industry, including being bad for Geospatial Open Source software.

Many people, including leaders of OSGeo and related communities, have already signed this letter. Thankyou. If you agree that "Geoservices REST API" will be bad for OSGeo and/or the greater spatial community, then please help us deliver this concern to OGC voters before they vote. Add your signature to the Open Letter before we deliver it on Wednesday 15 May 2013, and forward this message onto other OSGeo communities. (I notice that messages from this thread are being forwarded to the Spanish OSGeo email list. Thankyou.)

Wednesday, 20 March 2013

The UK Government have defined excellent design principles for deploying digital services, which is broadly applicable, and should be considered, by anyone developing applications for the web. They are summarised below:

Start with [user] needs
...

Build digital services, not websites
Our service doesn’t begin and end at our website. It might start with a search engine and end at the post office. We need to design for that, even if we can’t control it. And we need to recognise that some day, before we know it, it’ll be about different digital services again.

Do less
Government should only do what only government can do. ... We should concentrate on the irreducible core.

Design with data
... we can learn from [current] real world behaviour. ...

Do the hard work to make it simple
Making something look simple is easy; making something simple to use is much harder — especially when the underlying systems are complex — but that’s what we should be doing.

Iterate. Then iterate again.
The best way to build effective services is to start small and iterate wildly. Release Minimum Viable Products early, test them with real users, move from Alpha to Beta to Launch adding features and refinements based on feedback from real users.

Build for inclusion
...

Be consistent, not uniform
...

Make things open: it makes things betterWe should share what we’re doing whenever we can. With colleagues, with users, with the world. Share code, share designs, share ideas, share intentions, share failures. The more eyes there are on a service the better it gets — howlers get spotted, better alternatives get pointed out, the bar gets raised.
Partly because much of what we’re doing is only possible because of open source code and the generosity of the web design community. So we should pay that back. But mostly because more openness makes for better services — better understood and better scrutinised. If we give away our code, we’ll be repaid in better code. That’s why we’re giving away all this...

Local Chapters, as outreach initiatives are typically driven at the local level.

So lets expand on these:

OSGeo as a low capital, volunteer focused organisation

Should
OSGeo act as a high capital or low capital organisation? I.e., should
OSGeo dedicate energy to collecting sponsorship and then passing out
these funds to worthy OSGeo causes.
While initially it seems
attractive to have OSGeo woo sponsors, because we would all love to have
more money to throw at worthy OSGeo goals, the reality is that chasing
money is hard work. And someone who can chase OSGeo sponsorship is
likely conflicted with chasing sponsorship for their particular
workplace. So in practice, to be effective in chasing sponsorship, OSGeo
will probably need to hire someone specifically for the role. OSGeo
would then need to raise at least enough to cover wages, and then quite a
bit more if the sponsorship path is to create extra value.
This
high capital path is how the Eclipse foundation is set up, and how
LocationTech propose to organise themselves. It is the path that OSGeo
started following when founded under the umbrella of Autodesk.
However,
over the last seven years, OSGeo has slowly evolved toward a low
capital volunteer focused organisation. Our overheads are very low,
which means we waste very little of our volunteer labour and capital on
the time consuming task of chasing and managing money. Consequently, any
money we do receive (from conference windfalls or sponsorship) goes a
long way - as it doesn't get eaten up by high overheads. As discussed
and agreed by the board, this low capital path is something that is
working very well for us, and is the path we should continue to follow.

Support initiatives which support themselves

With
the thousands of great initiatives and opportunities that OSGeo could
get involved in, and limited budget, how should OSGeo set funding
priorities? Acknowledging that our volunteer community is blessed with
many talented individuals, our most effective way to tap into community
potential is to welcome individuals to "help scratch their itch".
Extending on this, funding priorities should follow the actions
of already successful communities. (Note the difference between "talk"
and "action"). If a task or project is important enough, it will attract
volunteers and/or sponsors to make it happen. In practice, this will
usually equate to providing co-contributions rather than outright
funding.
OSGeo's focus should be on initiatives which are of value
to all or most OSGeo projects, and to get best value for our limited
budget, OSGeo should target initiatives which have high value with
minimal investment.
With that in mind our priorities should be:

Support
marketing and out reach activities, with a primary focus on our FOSS4G
global conference, followed by regional and then local FOSS4G or related
events.

Educational type activities are a high priority, but likely will be a minimal cost activity from OSGeo's perspective.

Other initiatives which fit our priorities, as suggested by membership.

Initiatives which probably wouldn't quality:

Sponsoring core development of a particular project. (Too expensive, and only supports one project)

OSGeo
speaker travel expenses, or booth registration costs at a conference.
(If conferences/local community feel this is important, they will
either: 1. pay for the keynote, 2. make use of local talent, 3. waive
fees for our non-profit, 4. find a local sponsor)

Conferences and related events

Conferences
are financially risky events. They need to be planned well in advance,
and you are never sure how many people will turn up, or whether some
global event will have a substantial impact on registrations.
Consequently, conferences such as FOSS4G require financial guarantees up
front in order to secure a venue. To support and enable these
conferences, OSGeo will endevour to retain sufficient capital to offer
such guarantees for any FOSS4G event requesting it. If OSGeo's support
is requested, then OSGeo would expect these events to budget for a
modest profit under conservative estimates, and for OSGeo to retain
profits from such events. To date, such profits, while relatively
modest, have been OSGeo's primary income source.
Other spatial conferences regularly request an OSGeo involvement, such as providing presenters, workshops, OSGeo-Live DVDs for distribution, or providing a booth.
OSGeo facilitates such requests to the level we can achieve with
interested volunteers, but typically expects the conference or sponsors
to cover expenses.
OSGeo has limited budget set aside for code
sprints, which are seen as a valuable forum for giving directly back to
development teams. OSGeo will typically expect co-contributions from
interested sponsors, and would prefer to support code sprints which are
of benefit to multiple projects and communities.

Education

OSGeo
is very supportive of educational initiatives which is helping the
spread of OSGeo to students across the globe. This is currently focused
around the growing network of Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Laboratories within Universities around the world.
This educational initiative is currently progressing well without requiring OSGeo's financial support.

Packaging and Marketing

OSGeo's marketing effort has primarily been focused around the packaging and documentation efforts of OSGeo-Live, and to a lesser extend, osgeo4w. In 2012, OSGeo-Live was used at 45 events
without OSGeo's financial support. It has been entirely driven by
volunteer labour, by 140 OSGeo-Live volunteers, and printing costs have
been covered by local events or sponsors.
In the last couple of years, OSGeo has covered local chapter expenses required to purchase non-consumable items for conference booths (such as a retractable banner).
In
moving forward, OSGeo hope to extend marketing reach by providing
co-contributions toward printing costs of consumable items at
conferences, such as toward OSGeo-Live DVDs.

Local Chapters

Much
of OSGeo's marketing initiates are applied at the local level. In many
cases, this is best supported through as little as an email list and
wiki page. OSGeo also supports local chapters by offering to pay for an Exhibition starter pack for local chapters. Local chapters are also usually the coordinators of conferences and related events, as mentioned above.

Sponsorship

OSGeo
will continue to welcome sponsorship. Due to OSGeo's low capital model,
we are able to make sponsor's contribution provide substantial benefit
to the greater OSGeo community. In return, we promote sponsors' logos on
our website and through our OSGeo-Live marketing pipeline (which was
used at 45 geospatial events around the world in 2012).
However,
OSGeo is doesn't plan to either task volunteers with specifically
chasing sponsors, or hire someone to chase sponsorship on OSGeo's
behalf.